Comment by waltbosz
6 hours ago
I was thinking about this the other day in the context of the boardwalk town that I vacation in sometimes. There are a lot of college student aged workers who come from Europe for the summer and work in every service industry job imaginable in town. There are agencies that find these European workers and help them find jobs and housing.
It makes me wonder why there aren't more American young adults taking these jobs. I think it would be great fun to live at the beach for the summer. Maybe the wages are too low, or American kids are focused on internships? Or maybe the European workers are better employees? I don't know.
I live in a touristy town that does this with J1 workers. I'll tell you why: The jobs pay $7.25/hour.
The J1s are then packed like sardines into houses where they pay rent by the week. Why by the week? To remind them they're expendable and can be deported at a moment's notice by the restaurant/hotel/amusement park/etc. they work at. The worst I've heard is 16 people living in a 3-bedroom, 1 bathroom house.
The J1s themselves are typically great people. A lot of them do everything they can to stay in the area via Green Cards or whatever. Business that treat their J1s like shit are usually blacklisted by locals, too. We'll actively tell tourists not to give those businesses any business and why.
People are willing to take a discount on their wages and quality of life for the intangible benefit of ‘the experience of living and working abroad for a summer’.
For non-native English speakers it also has the advantage of providing a free total immersion language course as well. People pay for opportunities like that.
So yes, an Italian 19 year old is willing to work for less money for the chance to work in a water park for a summer, improving their English and boosting their resume, and if it gives them enough money to be able to fund a couple of weekend trips to New York or DC so much the better. It’s a life experience and a working vacation.
That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.
>That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.
Which should be pretty revolting for them if that's the case. Instead of American 19 year olds making some summer money at the waterpark to buy their first car, they get moved aside by disposable foreign workers, so then they need to stay supported by their parents for longer till they can get a "proper" job.
And I'm European not American, but I see the same issue here. Getting minimum wage jobs in the hospitality/service sector is super competitive now due to pressure from migrant workers who will accept anything. These are jobs that used to be done by teenagers in the past for summer money but not anymore.
Employers everywhere being able allowed to min/max wages against the most desperate labor on the planet should be banned.
And then governments have the audacity to complain about people not having kids anymore. Well no shit, my dad and his peers had summer jobs since he was 14 because there were no migrant workers to replace them, and after finishing high school he already had a job in the factory with housing benefits, he was already making enough money to have a family and 2 kids, not one.
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Same thing with au pairs and childcare work: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/09/683831264/au-pair-sponsor-age.... It’s basically below minimum wage.
Exactly. Au pairs are super common in Europe too, I even know of American ones.
The appeal for foreigners is living temporarily in Germany, Switzerland, etc.
It's an exchange: the host offers a roof, pays next to nothing for a live-in nanny, etc.
It's tourism + work.
I don't think anyone would do this as a career, and locals just do it in another country.
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If this is like what I saw in Maine coastal tourist towns this summer I suspect its popular with Europeans because the $15.10/hour local wage is attractive. But more so it's because you get to spend time a few months in a beautiful location surrounded by other attractive young people. Party scene is probably great.
I suspect you're correct on that front, too. I have family in an area that has been bringing in European teens to work seasonal tourist-facing jobs for probably(?) decades now. I can't speak to how they are treated outside my view, but anecdotally, they seem to really enjoy the opportunity. They get their little euro-crew together and basically have a College experience.
Locals like them, too - they're charming, generally well-behaved, polite, and it doesn't hurt that they don't have to pay them very much. I like to think the cultural exchange between the Europeans and the otherwise isolated locals is fantastic for broadening horizons, also.
Naturally, there’s an old This American Life episode about this which focuses on young international people who work summer at a highway rest stop.
Ep. 388
Oh, this was me 18 years ago. Worked a summer in Wyoming at a truck stop in the middle of the desert. It was kind of fun. Don't regret it a minute. My one and only trip to the US. People were warm and welcoming, if a bit wierd at times. The trip I did there with the Grayhound bus was _wild_. I think of my time there with fondness.
The right policy response would be telling the firms running these programs to get fucked if they can't successfully operate while paying staff the prevailing wage that local Americans would accept.
A nearby amusement park touted that they pay $20/hr. However it's seasonal, not year around. They raised wages because COVID-19 and current Administration policies decreased the supply of foreign college students who somehow had work authorization.
I learned this hiring practice in my home state of MN. The lake Superior North shore has resorts that hire these types of workers and pay them shit.
I agree. If the minimum wage is raised, there will be less incentives for businesses to hire cheap foreign workers.
When you say “I was thinking bout this the other day”, you weren’t thinking about this, in the sense of thinking about skilled worker immigration pathways for technology companies. What you were thinking about appears to be something entirely different - seasonal nonimmigrant unskilled labor.
There’s actually virtually nothing those two things have in common, except some unarticulated sense of grievance that in some unspecified way it would be better if Americans were doing those things.
I agree, my reply was tangential to the topic of the AP article being discussed here. I apologize for getting off topic.
And I didn't mean to give the impression that I have some grievance that these jobs aren't filled by Americans.
My curiosity was why aren't there more American kids having a working vacation in beach towns, not shame on these towns for importing labor.
And also the indentured servitude
One summer in my teens I worked as a groundskeeper at a Martha's Vineyard inn, and it _was_ a fun summer. I had a free place to stay (with a friend), plenty of free time, and little adult supervision.
Virtually all the hospitality staff there were European university students. Midway through the summer, they realized that they weren't earning enough to afford their return airfare and they threatened to strike. I don't recall how they resolved the issue, but I believe that they were netting less than minimum wage. Maybe things have changed since then, and maybe not.
The staff at Harris Teeter in Corolla NC (the outer banks) has been nearly 100% young adults from eastern European countries the last few times that I was down there.
I don't know their living situation, but I did see them both walking and riding bikes to the grocery store. It's a somewhat unique situation as the grocery store probably does 90% of their yearly business between June and August each year. I couldn't tell if they all knew each other from home or just from working together.
Do you mean that you are surprised that young Americans aren't working at the boardwalk in the USA or that young Americans are not working at the beaches in Europe?
or
There has to be a common thread here (ignore Canada's lack of boardwalks).
What does this mean? Use more words please.
The s/something/other/ patterns are regular expression replaces.
He's saying you can replace 'something' for 'other' in each of those patterns.
They are (quite obviously) saying that this could be changed to British people commenting on how all of the service jobs are Poles, or Canadians commenting how they are all Indian.
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I feel like AI has ruined hn
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Other countries import cheap labor too.
whats your point?
If you're a non-US citizen, I don't believe it's easy to just switch to a different job, which makes it difficult to just exit out of the job you have. US citizens could leave at any point for another job (or no job) if they chose, putting the staffing at the service roles at risk. Just speculating.
I just went to Asbury Park, NJ about a month ago. It was all local highschool/college kids. I go to an ice cream shop in Brooklyn by a park - all highschoolers.
I think it just depends on the location? But also yes - if I'm worth my salt, why would I take these jobs over higher paying internships? At 19 I was able to land $25/h jobs in tech. Maybe we should rethink the pay scales in terms of sustainability. Unfortunately we live in the US where short term gains are the sole motivator for most companies.
In Maine there are lots of early 20s workers that mostly seem to come from Balkan countries. I think those little tourist towns just don't have large enough populations to support the demand. Tourists probably outnumber actual locals. Places like NJ and Brooklyn though have plenty of 16-22 year olds who will work beach jobs.
I think it depends on what countries the owners have connections to. Random ice cream shop I visited in Florida a few years back was staffed by young Turkish women, my wife asked they said there on J1's. Before that we were in the Florida Keys - the local mosque was full of young Uzbek men that worked in the hotels, all on J1s.
Because you either continue paying rent for the room you're renting the rest of the year, or you risk not having digs in the fall.
For those European workers, a US wage more than pays for the rent for their vacant rent back home.
> who come from Europe for the summer and work in every service industry job imaginable in town
Do they have work visas for this, or are they abusing a travel visa? All the people I knew that did this were doing it illegally.
There is a program that allows university students to come to the US, work for a bit, and then stay for a month or so longer. It’s called work & travel. Many entertainment companies like six flags and casinos hire them. I have many friends who have done this years ago. The pay was low but they had a fun summer, travelled a bit, and came come with a new laptop or a good SLR camera. It wasn’t glamorous but a generally positive experience.
There is a "work and travel" program for students in Europe with valid visa and everything. I know lots of people who did that for a summer or two, it was an opportunity to see USA and also it was a great thing to list on their CV when getting a job back home.
because the american workers are off working on better opportunities afforded to them because the immigrants are working these service jobs.
And now that there's less of them, the jobs will be replaced by higher wage americans, which will increase inflation from the higher payroll costs.
I actually have taken that job as an American, any questions? I will say the Irish had an amazing work ethic despite being drunk half the time.
Only half?
Sleeping the other half?
some companies (Six Flags) have in the past abused the J-1 summer work travel program, and essentially trap young people in semi-remote dorms for the summer
companies do stuff like this because american young people won't tolerate it
Interesting framing. I thought that was part of the appeal. When I was in college I was actively looking for an opportunity to go to another country and do a temporary work thing where you stayed in a mountain resort and worked at the front desk all summer.
The problem is that you have to leave the country if you quit because you can't get someone to sponsor a different job, and you don't have your own transportation. The company charges you rent, for uniform, meals, and other costs... so you end up making very little and don't get treated well.
You don't get to experience much of the country because you're located in some dorm building that's not near much. So your summer ends up looking like 12 hour days standing around in the sun watching other people have fun.
A number of companies have been hit with slap-on-the-wrist fines for actually violating labor policies doing it.
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This is prevalent among the big ski consolidators (Vail Resorts, Alterra) year over year.
They were taking those jobs, but then the agencies decided they wanted a cut and found cheaper foreign workers, same as always
Wages are always too low if you replace Americans with cheaper foreigners.
you cant build career out of seasonal job in some random resort places across the country.
the idea is that foreigners will do the temp/seasonal low value work, while Americans were supposed to educate and upskill using federal student loans and get a high value jobs.
unfortunately American education system made it impossible, ue to stupidity.
Only China is able to do that: massively educate population and upskill and go up the value chain of manufacturing and industrialization.
I think this up-skilling sentiment misses that as a worker who thought a seasonal service job on the waterfront was a good deal, up-skilling means taking on 6 figures in debt - after which they will only have a ~1/5 chance of getting a job which compensates for the opportunity cost and debt. For many, this is actually a bad deal and growing their own seasonal business would have been a stronger career path.
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> impossible, ue to stupidity.
Due to the jobs not existing in the number required.
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So learn to code?
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It doesn't matter if someone can build a career out of seasonal jobs, which is entirely false btw. The market will dictate how much seasonal goods and services are worth, thus setting wages and property values.
Just like farm labor: without importing foreigners, legal or otherwise, wages would go up, food prices would go up, prices, wages, and property values would normalize to market rates.
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Only like 50% US population has a valid passport, 40% are a paycheck away from homelessness, and potential double taxation?
https://rusticpathways.com/blog/how-many-americans-have-a-pa...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/40-of-americans-one-step-from-p...
The person you're replying to was presumably talking about a vacation town in the US. Double taxation, by the way, is only an issue if an American makes over $100,000 per year in their foreign job.